The Turkish political system is closing ranks to protect the so-called “Turkish Century".

”The Turkish political system is closing ranks to protect the so-called “Turkish Century”.

Things have now settled inside the Republican People’s Party that Atatürk founded. Kılıçdaroğlu’s grip on the leadership is being locked in, while THE new party (YP) has been launched by the ousted, "noisy" Özgür Özel – the former CHP chairman whose election is still disputed. The imprisoned former mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, has quit the CHP and is joining this new outfit. Thus, getting İmamoğlu out of jail looks increasingly unlikely. Other opposition mayor is being locked up too – the latest being Ahmet Özer, mayor of the huge Istanbul district of Esenyurt. Özgür Özel himself may well share the fate of Demirtaş. The entire political system is tightening around a single idea: Turkey needs unity if it is to achieve the ambitious goals of the “Turkish Century”. Behind this new order under the Islamist AKP stand not only CHP leader Kılıçdaroğlu, but also the hard-line Turkish nationalist parties – first and foremost Bahçeli’s MHP – as well as the smaller Turkist groups (the so-called “Ideologues”) and the various Islamist outfits that grew out of the old Milli Görüş tradition. In the same spirit, parliament has just passed, by a crushing majority, a new law suspending sentences and prosecutions for Kurdish fighters who once belonged to organisations the authorities call “terrorist.” So, ahead of the 2027 elections, Erdoğan has already secured the consent of almost the entire political spectrum for his vision – the vision of the AKP and of Turkish political Islam more broadly (a theme we have been writing about for nearly a decade). He is now being cast as the only leader who truly crushed terrorism inside Turkey – greater even than Atatürk himself. That’s the picture…